COPIAPO, Chile, (Reuters) – Chilean rescuers today finished drilling an escape shaft for 33 miners trapped deep underground after a cave-in over two months ago, triggering cheers and tears from relatives on the surface.
Rescue workers jumped for joy as the drill pushed through the last inches (centimetres) of a nearly 2,050 foot-long (625 metre) shaft they have drilled down to free the men, live television footage showed. Relatives of the miners ran up the side of the hill above the mine waving Chilean flags.
In one of the most complex rescue attempts in mining history, it will take days to winch them to the surface one at a time in special capsules just wider than a man’s shoulders.
Relatives and friends of the trapped miners, who have held candlelight vigils at the accident-plagued gold and copper mine in the far northern Atacama desert since the Aug. 5 collapse, are waiting anxiously as the rescue bid nears its completion.
“My heart is pounding so hard!” said Norma Lague, whose 19-year-old son Jimmy Sanchez is among the trapped miners, as excitement mounted in ‘Camp Hope,’ the tent settlement that relatives erected at the mine.
The wives of some miners have been having their hair done in one of the tents set up as a makeshift hairdressers, as they prepare to be reunited with their husbands.
Some of the men have sent keepsakes like letters, crucifixes and clothes sent down to them in tubes back to the surface from the tunnel they called “hell.”
Engineers must still decide how much of the shaft to line with metal tubing before extracting the miners.
Once the escape tunnel is finished, it will take from three to 10 days to get all the men out, says Mining Minister Laurence Golborne, who has spearheaded the rescue effort.
After the cave-in, engineers initially bored narrow shafts the width of a grapefruit to locate the men.
When they were found 17 days after the accident, miraculously all still alive, celebrations sprang up across Chile. Rescuers then passed high-energy gels, water and food down the narrow ducts to keep the miners alive.
Images caught on a video camera lowered down the bore hole showed the bearded men bare-chested to cope with heat and humidity deep in the small mine in Chile’s mining heartland.
Trapped for 65 days so far, the men have set a world record for the length of time workers have survived underground after a mining accident. They are in remarkably good health, though some have skin infections.
President Sebastian Pinera’s wife, Cecilia Morel, has traveled to the mine to help lend psychological support to the miners’ relatives.
“Don’t let’s set our hearts on an exact evacuation date, let’s trust the experts,” Morel told relatives of the miners overnight. “It’s like waiting for a birth. It seems the mountain has started to dilate, but the dilation is two centimeters (under an inch).”
The government brought in a team of experts from the U.S. space agency NASA to help keep the men mentally and physically fit during the protracted rescue operation. The men had lost an estimated 22 pounds (10 kg) each during the 2-1/2 weeks before they were found alive.
